Charitable giving will not cover the cost of medical care.
A friend recently told me that medical care for the poor and elderly should be funded through charity, not taxation, and that if the government let us keep our money we could donate more to organizations that would provide medical care. I did some quick calculations to demonstrate that this idea is utterly unworkable. I’m not an expert but these numbers are correct as far as I can tell.
Total tax paid to fund Medicare and Social Security (both employer and employee contributions) is 15.3%. Median annual income for working age Americans is $23,036. That means an average of $3,525 is paid per person per year to fund Social Security and Medicare alone. According to the most recent surveys the average American donates $1,000 per year to charities and religious organizations. To merely replace the amount of money currently funding Medicare and Social Security everyone would have to increase their giving 350%. That would not – simply would not – happen. This doesn’t take into account Medicaid and SCHIP. It also does not take in account the discounts available to Medicare because of its purchasing power.
Life According to Literature Meme
I read this on Classical Bookworm and thought I’d give it a shot. You’re welcome to give your own answers in the comments.
Using only books you have read this year (2009), cleverly answer these questions. Try not to repeat a book title.
- Describe yourself: The Compleat Gentleman
- How do you feel: Out of Solitude
- Describe where you currently live: 84 Charing Cross Road
- If you could go anywhere, where would you go: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
- Your favourite form of transportation: Stardust
- Your best friend is: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- You and your friends are: Starship Troopers
- What’s the weather like: Twilight
- Favourite time of day: Breaking Dawn
- What is life to you: Fragile Things
- Your fear: The Graveyard Book
- What is the best advice you have to give: The Importance of Being Earnest
- Thought for the day: On the Shortness of Life
- How you would like to die: Inheriting Paradise
- My soul’s present condition: Called Out of Darkness
Rather quiet around here, isn’t it?
Yeah, not doing much blogging anymore. I got nuthin to say. I still like passing on links and such, though, so for the two or three of you who still check in here you might be better served to friend me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter, or keep an eye on my tumblelog (which now has commenting capability). I’m not giving this blog up but those other places are where I spend most of my time these days.
An extraordinary marriage story.
I am incredibly impressed by this story, via Mockingbird:
Let’s say you have what you believe to be a healthy marriage. You’re still friends and lovers after spending more than half of your lives together. The dreams you set out to achieve in your 20s — gazing into each other’s eyes in candlelit city bistros when you were single and skinny — have for the most part come true.
Two decades later you have the 20 acres of land, the farmhouse, the children, the dogs and horses. You’re the parents you said you would be, full of love and guidance. You’ve done it all: Disneyland, camping, Hawaii, Mexico, city living, stargazing.
Sure, you have your marital issues, but on the whole you feel so self-satisfied about how things have worked out that you would never, in your wildest nightmares, think you would hear these words from your husband one fine summer day: “I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did. I’m moving out. The kids will understand. They’ll want me to be happy.”
But wait. This isn’t the divorce story you think it is. Neither is it a begging-him-to-stay story. It’s a story about hearing your husband say “I don’t love you anymore” and deciding not to believe him. And what can happen as a result.
What would I have done?
Just as we are all, potentially, in Adam when he fell, so we were all, potentially, in Jerusalem on that first Good Friday before there was an Easter, a Pentecost, a Christian, or a Church. It seems to me worthwhile asking ourselves who we should have been and what we should have been doing. None of us, I’m certain, will imagine himself as one of the Disciples, cowering in agony of spiritual despair and physical terror. Very few of us are big wheels enough to see ourselves as Pilate, or good churchmen enough to see ourselves as a member of the Sanhedrin. In my most optimistic mood I see myself as a Hellenized Jew from Alexandria visiting an intellectual friend. We are walking along, engaged in philosophical argument. Our path takes us past the base of Golgotha. Looking up, we see an all too familiar sight – three crosses surrounded by a jeering crowd. Frowning with prim distaste, I say, ‘It’s disgusting the way the mob enjoy such things. Why can’t the authorities execute people humanely and in private by giving them hemlock to drink, as they did with Socrates?’ Then, averting my eyes from the disagreeable spectacle, I resume our fascinating discussion about the True, the Good and the Beautiful.
W.H. Auden, via Alan Jacobs
The consolations of pessimism.
Alain de Botton says that the Seneca should be the “author of the hour”:
Living in a time of continuous financial and political upheaval under the emperor Nero, Seneca interpreted philosophy as a discipline to keep us calm against a backdrop of continuous danger. His consolation was of the stiffest, darkest sort: “You say: ‘I did not think it would happen.’ Do you think there is anything that will not happen, when you know that it is possible to happen, when you see that it has already happened?” Seneca tried to calm the sense of injustice in his readers by reminding them, in ad 62, that natural and man-made disasters would always be part of their lives, however sophisticated and safe they thought they had become.
If we do not dwell on the risk of sudden calamity, in the markets and otherwise, and end up paying a price for our innocence, it is because reality comprises two cruelly confusing characteristics: on the one hand, continuity and reliability lasting across decades; on the other, unheralded cataclysms. We find ourselves divided between a plausible expectation that tomorrow will be much like today and the possibility that we will meet with an appalling event after which nothing will ever be the same. It is because we have such powerful incentives to neglect the second scenario that Seneca asked us to remember that our fate is forever in the hands of the Goddess of Fortune. This goddess can scatter gifts, and then, with terrifying speed, make a 50-year-old company disappear into a worthless asset, or let a balance sheet be destroyed by an evaporation of demand.
A farmer’s critique of Michael Pollan.
Blake Hurst, a Missouri farmer, heard a businessman seated behind him on an airplane explaining to his neighbor what’s wrong with the industrial food system. Eventually he couldn’t listen anymore:
I turned around and politely told the lecturer that he ought not believe everything he reads. He quieted and asked me what kind of farming I do. I told him, and when he asked if I used organic farming, I said no, and left it at that. I didn’t answer with the first thought that came to mind, which is simply this: I deal in the real world, not superstitions, and unless the consumer absolutely forces my hand, I am about as likely to adopt organic methods as the Wall Street Journal is to publish their next edition by setting the type by hand.
He was a businessman, and I’m sure spends his days with spreadsheets, projections, and marketing studies. He hasn’t used a slide rule in his career and wouldn’t make projections with tea leaves or soothsayers. He does not blame witchcraft for a bad quarter, or expect the factory that makes his product to use steam power instead of electricity, or horses and wagons to deliver his products instead of trucks and trains. But he expects me to farm like my grandfather, and not incidentally, I suppose, to live like him as well. He thinks farmers are too stupid to farm sustainably, too cruel to treat their animals well, and too careless to worry about their communities, their health, and their families. I would not presume to criticize his car, or the size of his house, or the way he runs his business. But he is an expert about me, on the strength of one book, and is sharing that expertise with captive audiences every time he gets the chance. Enough, enough, enough.
The article strikes me as important because it is a well-argued polemic aimed at the Wendell Berry-Michael Pollan style “agri-intellectuals.” Particularly interesting are his arguments that confining pigs is the only way to make sure piglets aren’t smothered and that herbicide usage reduces soil erosion.
Vampire links.
Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan on why we love vampire stories.
Neil Gaiman answers the same question and adds that vampires should go underground now for 20 or 25 years.
Finally, here’s a list of literary vampire novels.
Against the haters of they, singular.
NYT’s “On Language” column mounts a defense of using they as a gender neutral singular pronoun (via Alan Jacobs). I was intrigued by their historical argument. I use “they” in this way all the time in conversation. I know it really annoys people who want to insist on “he” as a generic pronoun. It doesn’t seem like a hill worth dying on to me.
